will introduce you to the exciting new pivot table features in Excel 2007. Create quick summaries and pivot charts, add impact with traffic light icons, design calculated fields, group dates and numbers.
Blog Stats Dashboard Template
One of the things that I do while drinking my morning coffee is to check the statistics for my website and blog. It’s interesting to see the fluctuations in traffic, and discover where’s it coming from. I use Google Analytics and my web host also has a daily statistics file that shows me the hits and downloads.
Not that I’m obsessed or anything, but I track the statistics in a couple of Excel files, and even have a line chart for the monthly totals. Today I saw a blog statistics dashboard that a Canadian PR firm uses for its clients, and it puts my little system to shame.
Apparently the reports are created monthly, with lots of cutting and pasting, but you could probably automate something similar in Excel. It has a nice clean look, and you customize it to show the statistics of interest to you or your clients.
You can download the dashboard template in pdf format, and make changes to it, if you have Adobe Acrobat. I had to change the font before I could edit the text, but maybe that’s because I’m still using Acrobat 5.0.
Comment from David Jones
Time: September 11, 2008, 3:08 pm
Hey, Debra. Glad you like the template. We’re throwing around the idea of making it a Wordpress plug-in, but in the meantime since we’re pulling stats from Google Analytics, Feedburner, Google Search results, Alexa and some manual counts from the blog itself, it does take a bit of manual labour to plug in all the numbers.
If you use it and have any ideas on how we could improve it, let me know.
Thanks for telling your readers about it.
Comment from Debra Dalgleish
Time: September 11, 2008, 3:58 pm
Thanks David, and I’ll watch your blog for news on any updates to the template. It’s a nice design that could inspire other summary reports to clients.
Comment from JP
Time: September 11, 2008, 4:25 pm
Sounds like a fun Excel project!
There’s a WP plugin that shows similar results, check it out here:
http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/wordpress-reports/
I used it for a while, but I actually enjoy going to 10 different sites and looking at stats. They each show much more detail than a single aggregating tool does. Plus there’s only so many plugins you can have before it starts slowing down your site.
ps- Does anyone still trust Alexa?
Comment from Debra Dalgleish
Time: September 11, 2008, 6:54 pm
Thanks JP, I’ll check out that plugin. I tried a different one, but couldn’t get it working. And it is interesting to get all the detail from the individual sites.
Comment from David Jones
Time: September 12, 2008, 10:07 am
The Alexa stat I use in the template shows how much traffic to the main domain goes to the blog’s subdomain. For example: of all traffic to PRworks.ca, 3% goes to blog.PRworks.ca.
It’s just one measure, but if it proves to be inaccurate or unreliable, I’ll dump it.
Comment from JP
Time: September 12, 2008, 11:17 am
My understanding of the Alexa issue is that it is a marketing tool disguised as an alleged “third party” look at web traffic.
Besides their web spider, the major source of their data is the browsing habits of people who have the Alexa toolbar installed.
This necessarily skews the results because (a) you have to be using IE to install the toolbar, which, according to my Google Analytics data, immediately lowers my stats by about 30%, and (b) only certain types of people would install a SEO toolbar.
In other words, it isn’t as objective as it should be.
Comment from Abapydype
Time: December 19, 2008, 10:45 pm
Seldom I write comments but resource really cool